By P Kharel
South Asian politicians believe in loud self-praise, cry hoarse against conspiracy, swear by lofty ideals but bend backwards for power, unabashedly throwing to the winds all their talk of high moral grounding and political ideology. The moment an opportunity for wheeling dealing to the seat of power is sensed, they become “pragmatic” and become willing partners to the “ground reality and the need of the hour”.
In India, the land of 1.43b population, there is no communist constituent sharing power or ruling on its own in any state. This is for the first time since its independence in 1947. They were marginalised in West Bengal in 2011 after ruling for 34 years without a break. Then their electoral prospects sunk, wistfully thinking of the heydays during the 17 years of Jyoti Basu and Buddhadev Bhattacharjee as chief ministers.
The CPM missed at least two chances in heading the union government at the c entre in New Delhi. Basu showed interest in the opportunity but his communist colleagues advised him to stay out because their position was weak for any durable government.
That happened in 1979 with Lok Dal’s Charan Singh, projected as a leader of farmers, who publicly admitted his “life time dream of becoming prime minister at least once”. His premiership lasted for only 23 days when Indira Gandhi pulled the rug from under his feet. In 1990, Chandra Shekhar, too, split from Janata Dal and National Front alliance when he fell for the Congress bait, only to lose the promised support from outside in seven months on some blatantly lame excuse of intelligence personnel having been posted outside Rajiv Gandhi’s residence.
In Nepal, for the first time, a multiparty parliament is without the presence of a Koirala tag. Four Koirala family members donned the premiership ten times since the dawn of democracy in 1951. They might have upgraded the record were it not for the 30 years when the Koirala family boycotted the partyless Panchayat elections as undemocratic.
UNIQUE RCORD: Nepal holds another political record. There have been ten governments led by six communist prime ministers—something not to be recorded anywhere in the world of multiparty political order. Manmohan Adhikary led a minority government in 1994-95. In the last 20 years, five other communists headed the government nine times, including Pushpa Kamal Dahal, Baburam Bhattarai, Madhav Kumar Nepal, Jhala Nath Khanal and KP Oli. Today, the communists’ presence parliament is a far shadow from previous positions down the past three and a half decades.
The United States and its European minions see the development as a big advantage for them. Fall of the communists is preferable than the debacle of any rightist regime. The Nepalese experience shows that co-corrupt at the helm of state affairs or corridors of powers have been individuals with no credentials other than their proximity to political bigwigs and fatten with unaccounted to wealth that their lifestyles so vulgarly put on display.
No work is done without greasing palms and lining the pockets of the appropriate influencers and the powerful. As former Minister Radha Krishna Mainali put it succinctly, minsters and corruption are synonyms in the vocabulary Nepalese politics, coined after the 1990 restoration of multiparty democracy.
INGLORIOUS: Thelarger sections of the news media have not exactly landed themselves in great glory. In the course of more than a half century of scribing as a full-time practising journalist and a significant university academic career in the same field, yours faithfully notes with pain the extensive lack of free, fair and independent journalism.
The few news outlets with better credentials are under severe resource constraints in a country whose grossly weak industrial and commercial base does not allow the advertising cake to grow at a time when the number of information and entertainment channels has soared at breathtaking strides.
The silence over the daily killings of civilians in Gaza and the absence of detailed coverage in Ukraine since February 2022 sink mainstream media’s credibility to the seabed. In most conflicts, the news media in the West tend to tilt toward what their governments stand for. It is only when things deteriorate beyond redemption that they gather their critical faculties for action.
The press covered in great detail the wars in the Korean Peninsula in the 1950s, Vietnam in the 1960s and the 20-year war in Afghanistan war since the US-led invasion in 2001. Those were few of the many cases from which the US and its allies turned their tails without they triumph they envisaged. In much part of the wars, the media were hardly critical of the killing fields. As the communists in North Korea and Vietnam, and the Taliban in Afghanistan stood firm in their fierce fighting spirit, the invading forces pulled out.
HUMILIATING HURRY: In Afghanistan, NATO members and other close American allies battled for 20 long years before quitting the war sites in a humiliating hurry to the extent of leaving behind some $200 billion in arms and equipment. And the audiences in most parts of the world, depending on the “international media” were caught completely unawares about the development.
For the mass audiences were never adequately informed of the setbacks for foreign forces. Instead, the adversaries were grossly underreported for their valiant stand against far better equipped powers. Only when the situation was at its grimmest than did the media belatedly began projecting a more realistic scenario.
The West receives with great satisfaction the latest development on the decline of communists in the world’s most populous region that represents every fifth of humanity, which borders communist China. In Nepal, too, a multiparty political system with a record number of elected communist prime ministers is now witness to a highly shrunk communist presence in parliament.
But the Maoists in India, known as Naxalites, are in the process of bouncing back in action. After all the late Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said, just before Narendra Modi succeeded him, that the greatest threat to the country’s security were the Naxalites.
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